Like so many who have been trapped in the prison system, dehumanized through relentless institutionalization, and had their identity scraped away and replaced by a number and the cold details of their crime for about four hours or so, Lindsay Lohan naturally has had trouble readjusting on the outside, where she’s ostensibly a free woman, yet invisibly shackled by a world that still sees phantom stripes across her shoulders. It’s a notoriety that would take, say, three or four nude pictorials to refute, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any easier thanks to the song “Give Me Everything,” which back in August spurred Lohan to sue rapper Pitbull for defaming her character by alluding to the fact that she’d been to prison—which is just the sort of unfair discrimination that makes it impossible for many ex-convicts to find leading roles in Hollywood productions.

Realizing that he was perpetuating a cruelly classist stance, immediately after Lohan filed the suit, Pitbull apologized, suggesting that the phrase “I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan” was not a reference to her prison time, but rather to Lohan’s comparable skills in keeping such tight control over her affairs. However, now Pitbull has filed a countersuit suggesting he might have been somewhat disingenuous about his admiration of Lindsay Lohan’s business skills, saying that her recent run-ins with the law actually justify the lyric—which is, he now admits, about Lindsay Lohan getting physically locked up, and not just a clever metaphor. Pitbull’s countersuit also argues that Lohan has no right to sue him in New York, as she’s clearly a resident of California, specifically its jails and morgues.

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He further claims that any damage to Lohan’s reputation came not through the widespread influence of the ideas expressed in the Pitbull song “Give Me Everything,” but as a result of her own actions. Indeed, it seems that Lohan, like so many former prisoners, will never stop paying for her crime, and will be forced to rely solely on the makeshift welfare state of lucrative endorsement deals and Hugh Hefner’s handouts, rather than on the out-of-court settlements for slander that other citizens take for granted. When will the cycle end?